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Comment by punkcoder | Hacker News Reader

"The Protecting Internet Freedom Act would also ensure that the United States maintains sole ownership of the .gov and .mil top-level domains, which are vital to national security."

I almost did a spit take...

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I agree with this. I like being able to know that a site is trustworthy based on it having a .gov domain name.

Agree, I have no problem with this. By not limiting these to government uses and ownership, you are only opening the door for malicious websites to fool users...

I mean... do you really want to have to guess whether congress.gov is run by the government, or some random country which decided to sell of .gov TLDs for extra cash?

Or, potentially more deceptively to consumers, "healthcare.gov", etc.

The other option is not giving it over to some random country. As I understand it, the other option would be giving the assignment of top-level domains to ITU or some similar agency within UN, which would then delegate .gov and .mil and other things to US.

The same people who would have problems with "some random country" would have even more problems with the UN.

I'm generally less critical of the UN, but I would agree that the UN is pretty much the last body that should be invested with any sorts of power.

is it really so bad to do what everyone not in the US does and add an extra 3 characters? .gov.us; SOLVED

I agree this is a problem worth solving. But shouldn't it be solved for every country, not just the US?

As a non-US citizen, I find it strange that matters of global internet governance are discussed with apparently mostly arguments about US-specific issues.

As a US citizen, I find it strange as well. But our Republican Party seems to believe we're special and should be treated differently. We aren't and we shouldn't be.

I had to prove I was a student multiple times by sending / receiving mail at .edu address. It's not unreasonable for people to assume that if you control a .gov domain you're a legitimate US government agency. I think Internet control should become less US-centric, but I agree with them there'll need to be some effort to deal with the .gov TLD issue.

My university has offered courtesy mail forwarding to alumni since ~2000 (probably a good bit earlier).

Yes, and think how unfair it is to students at universities in other countries that they don't get .edu addresses. Why should the US have this monopoly?

Yeah, it's written like if this law doesn't pass, China will be have full access to the NSA.

Yeah I don't understand the reasoning behind this at all.

My guess, this prevents DNS poisoning attacks.

Somewhere, somehow, there is critical infrastructure tied to a .gov or .mil [email/web] address.

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